Mind Matters
Friday, October 7, 2011 at 6:27PM | by Otter The Atlantic in September carried a report of ethnic Hmong dying of fright in their sleep.
The root phenomenon? A failure of the body to exercise proper sleep paralysis, the brain's way of keeping us from acting out our dreams. This failed in the case of the Hmong: 117 of them died, apparently, because of a sort of glitch in REM sleep that produced sleep paralysis. The Atlantic explains:
Across cultures, night-mare visits play out in very similar ways. Victims experience the strange feeling of being "awake." While they have a realistic perception of their environment, they can't move. Worse, they feel an "overwhelming fear and dread" accompanied by chest pressure and difficulty breathing. Scientists have a pretty good grasp of how all of this happens... People who have an experience of sleep paralysis tend to feel some horrible, evil being is near them. "I just knew this presence was there. An ominous presence ... not only could I not see it, but I couldn't defend myself, I couldn't do anything," one victim [reports]. This feeling is consistent across cultures, even if it goes by different names and presents through the culture one knows.
(Note: I've experienced "pressing on," or sleep paralysis, with this sense of ghostly or demonic presences.)
Shelly Adler's book Sleep Paralysis investigates the deaths of the Hmong and attributes them to cultural-dependent "interpretations" of what was happening to them. This is the "nocebo" effect, the opposite of the placebo effect: the mind can work evil upon the body.
A sensed presence appears not only in such "dreams." Stanley Koren's "God Helmet" has been able to stimulate a sense of presence in isolated subjects.
Fascinating stuff, and further evidence that the imagination creates the world in its own image, to an alarming degree.
Reader Comments (1)
It IS fascinating!
It sounds like a genetic heart defect found in the Hmong people also plays a big part in these deaths.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brugada_syndrome
Thanks for sharing the article. I enjoyed it.